Sinclair Lewis: A Comparison
by A
As GOOD Americans, we spend a vast amount of time wondering about our “progress” and measuring our own I.Q.’s and filling out quiz tests — with the answers on page 67 — and taking our cultural temperatures by checking over How Good Are Your Manners? Now we know. Sinclair Lewis of the photographic eye and the phonographic ear has told us. He has made careful recordings, at twenty-fiveyear intervals, of our manners and marriages out here in the great duck-shooting, furnace-regulating belt known as the Middle West.
His first clinical report in 1920, called Main Street, virtually obligated him to write this second report, which he has called Cass Timberlane. For the last scene of Main Street was both a promise and a threat, as Carol Kennicott, the pretty, iconoclastic, but innocuously straying wife, points to her sleeping baby and warns her husband, “Do you see that object on the pillow? Do you know what it is? It’s a bomb to blow up smugness. If you Tories were wise, you wouldn’t arrest anarchists; you’d arrest all these children while they’re asleep in their cribs. Think of what that baby will see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000!” And Will Kennicott yawns in husbandly agreement and wonders about putting up the storm windows.
Now, a generation later, we find out from Cass Timberlane whether that small human bomb turned out to be a dud, and just what kind of things it probably saw and meddled with during the twentyfive years while it was growing up and all the little Gopher Prairies were straining to be Grand Republics (and the Grand Republics to be Omahas).
Make no mistake about it; our progress in sophistication and civilization out here in the land of the nasal twang has been spectacular. ( onsider first the manners of naïve, gawky Gopher Prairie as depicted in Main Street, circa 1920; then compare them with those of Grand Republic as portrayed in Cass Timberlane. In the former book the rich, rude, noisy Harry Haydocks own the Bon Ton store and lord it over the town socially. But twenty-five years later, according to Cass Timberlane, we have progressed to the rich, rude, noisy Boone Havocks of Grand Republic, who own a construction business and a controlling interest in the Blue Ox National Bank.
You can see what a step up that is.
And the staunch, ungrammatical, highly solvent good friend, Sam Clark, of Gopher Prairie, whose house is filled with golden oak and cut-glass vases on doilies, gives way in the later book to the staunch, ungrammatical, highly solvent good friend, Roy Drover, whose house has air-conditioning and a rumpus room with a bar. Progress, obviously.
The social oligarchy of Gopher Prairie, the female Jolly Seventeen card club, which meets to eat and feel exclusive, is supplanted today in Grand Republic by a male oligarchy, the Federal Club, which meets to eat and feel exclusive, abetted by plate-glass windows and a doorman. Pretty sophisticated, that last. And the amateur theatricals of funny little Gopher Prairie have now become the amateur theatricals of funny biggish Grand Republic, but this time they boast a paid director. That shows you our cultural strides.
The two books point up sharply our vastly more civilized attitude today, over what it was twenty-five years ago, toward that old and sometimes trying institution, marriage. Each book relates the efforts of a solid citizen to tame a much younger wife. A wife just brimming over with whimsy and quicksilvery carping and sensitiveness and self-depreciating smugness. But whereas the husband in the earlier Main Street is only a rugged, capable, leaned-upon village doctor who reads nothing but the medical journals and the newspaper, the husband in Cass Timberlane is a rugged, capable, leaned-upon judge who reads law journals and the life of Lord Birkenhead. You can see the immense difference there.
Our new maturity is evidenced in the modern treatment of the discontented wife. In the first book, the doctor takes his bored wife away on a trip to the Grand Canyon in order to try to win her back. He fails, for she still insists on leaving him in order to Think Things Out. In the second book, the judge takes his bored wife clear to New York and the night clubs. True, his effort fails too, for she also insists on leaving him in order to Live Her Own Life; but think how much more broadening the latter trip must have been!
Nowhere is our newly mellowed attitude toward marriage and sex more clearly indicated than in the respective courses followed by the two bored wives. Poor Carol Kennicott, back in Main Street in 1920, can achieve relief from marital ennui only by going to Washington and holding down a rather tedious office job. Her doctor husband comes East once to plead with her, and make love to her, but he nobly goes back home to let her make up her mind. Actually, of course, it is her body which makes up her mind. For not until she feels her second baby stirring within her does she return to the tepid claims of marriage and home life.
Now observe Jinny, the Grand Republic wife, and see how fearless and untrammeled she is in 1945. No banal job-holding for her when she gets bored with matrimony. Instead, on that trip to New York and the night clubs with her husband, she slips out one afternoon while he is engaged in stodgy business and expresses her freedom by committing adultery with his best friend. Anyone can see what an advance this is in honesty and naturalness over the timid reticences of twenty-five years earlier. From stenography to adultery.
Again, like Carol, Jinny must have her freedom for a while — which freedom assumes the guise of the best-friend heel. And like Carol, when freedom palls, she returns to the lusterless claims of marriage and home life. Once more it is the body, rather than the mind, which decides; but the decision is not due to anything so artless as morning sickness. It is diabetes that sends her back to her singularly put-upon spouse diabetes and the need for regular meals, insulin shots, and the payment of her bills. You can see how much more sophisticated this solution is. Diabetes in place of diapers.
However, nothing is so indicative of our amazing progress in the past twenty-five years as are the final words of the two books. Main Street ends with the mutterings of Doc Kennicott, the husband, about, putting up storm windows. Whereas Cass Timberlane ends with the musings of Jinny, the wife, about putting up storm windows. Certainly that ought to be significant of something.